Farther to Go!

Brain-Based Transformational Solutions

Distractibility, Procrastination, and Focus: Look, a Bird!

by Leave a Comment

look a bird

Everyone procrastinates at one time or another. Two big contributing factors to procrastination are straightforward: low self-confidence and the aversiveness of tasks. If we doubt our ability to complete a chore and find it as exciting as watching concrete set, we are more likely to put it off. It is no wonder that calculating our taxes, which is both difficult and boring, is famous for making procrastinators out of almost all of us. However, not everyone is a habitual procrastinator.

Procrastination is a characteristic often associated with perfectionism, as if perfectionism is a direct and quantifiable cause of procrastination. But it turns out that perfectionists actually tend to procrastinate less than other people do, which makes sense when you think about it.

Anxiety is another tendency that is frequently associated with procrastination. However:

According to analysis of about a hundred studies involving tens of thousands of participants, anxiety produces a negligible amount of procrastination at best—and even that tiny amount disappears completely after you take into account other personality characteristics, especially impulsiveness. –Piers Steel, Ph.D., author of The Procrastination Equation

This research suggests that the anxiety people feel when a deadline is staring them in the face and they aren’t sure they can meet it is the result of having procrastinated.

According to Piers Steel, it’s impulsiveness that is “the nickel-iron core” of procrastination:

[I]mpulsiveness creates procrastination because it makes small but immediate temptations, like playing Minesweeper or updating your social network status, especially attractive. The reward might be small but the delay is virtually nonexistent. On the flip side, large but distant rewards, like graduating or saving for retirement, aren’t valued much at all. Despite their importance, these long-term goals don’t motivate us until the march of time itself eventually transforms them into short-term consequences. Only in those final hours do we frantically try to catch up on what we really should have addressed long before. The more impulsive you are, the closer to deadlines you need to be before you’ll feel fully motivated.

I understand what he’s saying about impulsiveness, but I wonder if distractibility—which means to turn away from the original focus of attention or interest—might not be a more apt term for this than impulsiveness—which means to act suddenly on impulse without reflection.

Focus

A distraction is something that keeps us from giving 100% of our attention to what we’re doing or attempting to do right now. By diverting our attention, it dims our focus. Being distracted isn’t the same as choosing to take a break. Allowing ourselves to be distracted is rarely a conscious choice.

The path to anywhere is booby-trapped with an unrelenting blitzkrieg of tempting distractions so magnificent and horrible—and insistent—they may even invade our dreams.

These distractions tempt us because they include:

  • things we’re naturally interested in
  • things we’re convinced we need to know (every single thing there is to know) about
  • things we have to be on top of or take care of
  • things we suddenly remember we forgot to do
  • things that are simply so compelling we can’t not be distracted by them
  • things that take our minds off whatever we’re doing that we don’t want to be doing
  • things that seem better (more interesting, easier, or maybe just newer) than whatever we’re doing now

The internet is a major—and obvious—source of distraction, but it is an amateur compared to the source of distraction inside our own heads.

Attention is notoriously difficult to keep focused. One reason is that conscious attention requires, well, consciousness, and conscious (System 2) attention is a limited resource that can’t be easily or quickly renewed. It definitely can’t be renewed on command. If we squander it early in the day, we may not have enough left for another task that requires it later on. And squander it we do, on all kinds of things that are not worth actually thinking about.

When it comes to maintaining focus on a long-term goal—keeping our eyes on a distant prize—we often trip ourselves up at the outset by not accounting for the inevitable flagging of conscious attention. All evidence to the contrary, we’re convinced we will maintain the same level of enthusiasm and focus through the entire extent of a project that we had at the beginning of it. We count on our interest and enthusiasm to carry us through. It can’t and it won’t.

The sane thing to do, then, would be to assume that our interest, enthusiasm, and attention are going to flag and to create a plan that doesn’t rely solely on will power, self-discipline, enthusiasm, interest, or anything else that comes and goes.

Use Your Brain

If you want to use your brain to help maintain your focus, one thing you can do is set up checkpoints along the path to monitor your progress and to reward yourself for your achievements. The hits of dopamine your brain releases when you reward yourself will not only make you feel good, they will also activate emotional and learning circuits to increase the likelihood you will remember what you did and will want to do it again. As you get closer to reaching your goal, your brain will actually increase the amount of dopamine it releases each time you pass another checkpoint.

Achieving a distant goal—which could mean two months, two years, or two decades from now—requires detailed planning in order to get your brain to get with the program. Imagining the outcome—so you know what you’re aiming for—is important. But if you don’t identify all the steps it will take to get to the finish line and claim the prize, your brain will not be on board. Your brain, in fact, will be looking to board any passing train it catches sight of, and it will be taking you right along with it.

Just as everyone procrastinates from time to time, anyone can become distracted. The trick is to not allow chasing squirrels to become a habit.

How much do you procrastinate? Here’s a link to a procrastination survey you can complete. It might be an interesting distraction.

Light Up Your Brain with Gratitude

by Leave a Comment

gratitude

Thanksgiving is the one day a year we set aside to reflect on the people and the things we’re grateful for. At least that’s the idea. The reality of feast, family, friends, fun, and football isn’t entirely off the mark. All those warm, festive feelings are good for us and good for each other. At least they have the potential for keeping us out of trouble. But the giving thanks part of Thanksgiving can easily fall by the wayside, especially in light of another characteristic of the holiday: frenzy.

Yes, it’s nice to have a day that’s focused on people getting along, eating good food together, and thinking about what we’re grateful for. But it’s hard to stuff a year’s worth of gratitude into a single day. Gratitude is more powerful and more effective when undertaken as a regular practice than when treated as an annual event.

Multiple studies confirm that gratitude can improve your health, happiness, and wellbeing. Among other things, a regular gratitude practice can help you:

  • Sleep better and longer
  • Exercise more
  • Be more optimistic
  • Decrease aches and pains
  • Lower anxiety and depression
  • Increase resilience

How? Well, researchers at the National Institute of Health (NIH) observed that people who felt gratitude had higher activity in the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus is an area of the brain responsible for controlling such bodily functions as eating, drinking, and sleeping, as well as influencing stress levels and metabolism.

Gratitude also activates the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is involved in the brain’s reward system. The release of dopamine fills us with a feeling of pleasure. It’s the reward we get for the behavior we just engaged in. The purpose of the brain’s reward system is to help ensure that we learn—and remember—behaviors that enhance our chances of remaining alive. That’s why so many of the things we naturally find rewarding are related to food and reproduction. In addition to food and sex, lots of things trigger the release of dopamine, including social interactions, generosity, and—as it turns out—gratitude.

Dopamine plays a role in:

  • Movement
  • Memory
  • Behavior and cognition
  • Attention and alertness
  • Motivation
  • Sleep
  • Mood
  • Learning

It’s part of a brain circuit called the mesolimbic pathway, which connects behaviors to feelings of pleasure, resulting in the formation of habits. When dopamine is released, emotional and learning circuits are activated to increase the likelihood we will remember what we did so we can repeat the behavior. The hit of dopamine we get from feeling grateful engages our brain in what neuroscience researcher Alex Korb calls “a virtuous cycle.” Once we begin practicing gratitude, our brain actively looks for things to be grateful for. How cool is that?

Find a Gratitude Practice that Works for You

There are several different ways to practice gratitude. You can choose one, mix and match, or modify one or more to suit yourself. The keyword is “practice,” which means doing it on a regular basis.

  • Gratitude Journal: Keep a gratitude journal in which to record things you experience that you’re grateful for. You can do it by hand, on a computer, or with an app.
  • Gratitude List: Think of—or record—one or more things you’re grateful for, either every day or once a week. Interestingly, there’s evidence that doing this weekly is more effective than doing it daily.
  • Expressing Gratitude: Create a daily practice of conveying your gratitude to other people—friends, family, co-workers, service people, even strangers—verbally or in writing.
  • Gratitude Meditation: Begin your meditation by acknowledging what you are grateful for in the present moment.

At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us. —Albert Schweitzer  

Gratitude is an appreciation for what is meaningful and valuable to us. Simply experiencing feelings of gratitude can enhance our wellbeing by changing our brain. But since we’re social animals, it makes sense that sharing those feelings by expressing our gratitude whenever possible is even more rewarding.

You’re Not Sabotaging Yourself

by 1 Comment

self-sabotage

Following right on the heels of a lack of will power, the number two reason people come up with for not following through on what they set out to do is self-sabotage. This is a catchall phrase that seems to refer to any behavior that is inconsistent with one’s conscious intentions or goals. As such, it’s completely meaningless.

You may routinely do things that you regret doing:

  • Overeat when you’re trying to lose weight
  • Sleep in when you want to go to the gym
  • Fail to study for an exam you want to pass
  • Put less than your best effort into a project that matters

But that doesn’t mean you’re sabotaging yourself.

Here’s the Merriam-Webster definition of sabotage: “the act of destroying or damaging something deliberately so that it does not work correctly.” Dictionary.com defines it as “any underhand interference with production, work, etc….as by enemy agents during wartime or by employees during a trade dispute.” Vocabulary.com says sabotage occurs “when you ruin or disrupt something by messing up a part of it on purpose.”

What these and all other definitions of the word sabotage have in common is the element of deliberateness. Sabotage, by definition, isn’t accidental or an unfortunate side-effect. It is intentional. So in order for us to be sabotaging ourselves, we would have to be engaging in counterproductive behavior on purpose.

This gets dicey right off the bat because we’re told our counterproductive (self-sabotaging) behavior originates in the unconscious. It is “hidden from our everyday thoughts,” according to one self-help author. But if we do something because we’re “unconsciously compelled” to do it, as a psychologist wrote, then it can’t possibly be intentional or deliberate.

Yes, it’s true—and inevitable—that we have competing or conflicting beliefs, goals, and intentions. In Incognito, David Eagleman says:

Brains…are built of multiple, overlapping experts who weigh in and compete over different choices. As Walt Whiteman correctly surmised, we are large and we harbor multitudes within us. And those multitudes are locked in chronic battle.

When the hostess at a party offers chocolate cake, you find yourself on the horns of a dilemma: some parts of your brain have evolved to crave the rich energy source of sugar [System 1], and other parts care about the negative consequences, such as the health of your heart or the bulge of your love handles [System 2]. Part of you wants the cake and part of you tries to muster the fortitude to forgo it.

Brains can be of two minds, and often many more. We don’t know whether to turn toward the cake or away from it, because there are several little sets of hands on the steering wheel of our behavior.

This is relatively straightforward and in no way implies that the part of our brain that craves sugar, System 1, has an intention to undermine System 2’s attempts to manage our health. The brain just doesn’t work that way.

Eagleman proposes that the brain is best understood as a team of rivals and adds:

Remember that competing factions typically have the same goal—success for the country—but they often have different ways of going about it.

How we frame a problem determines where and how we go about looking for its solution. If we view our counterproductive behavior as resulting from self-sabotage, we’re likely to divert our attention to trying to figure out why we’re sabotaging ourselves. But we don’t have direct access to the unconscious, which is where our so-called sabotage originates, so even if we were sabotaging ourselves we could never actually get to the bottom of things.

We harbor mechanical, “alien” subroutines to which we have no access and of which we have no acquaintance. Almost all of our actions—from producing speech to picking up a mug of coffee—are run by alien subroutines, also known as zombie systems.

Looking back into the past to find the trail of breadcrumbs that leads to the behavior of today amounts to a whole lot of wheel-spinning. It can’t succeed, and even if it could, it wouldn’t make any difference in regard to solving the problem at hand: getting our behavior to line up with our conscious intentions.

That’s because it isn’t the unconscious part of the brain that’s the problem; it’s the conscious part. If we don’t know what we want, we don’t have a clear direction. If we aren’t fully committed to what we set out to do (or claim to be setting out to do), we have no urgency. Without both direction and urgency, our best laid plans are dead in the water.

We can retrain System 1 to do more of what we want it to do and less of what we don’t want it to do. But that requires repetition and persistence. Lots of repetition. And lots of persistence. It isn’t easy—and it isn’t as sexy as searching for our inner saboteur—but it’s both straightforward and effective.

Self-sabotage is nothing more than a good cover story.

Freedom from Choice

by 3 Comments

broccoli

You always have a choice. At least that’s what many people believe. No matter what happens, you can choose how to respond. And if you want things to be different, all you have to do is make different choices.

It’s a highly appealing belief to hold, yet you may have found that making a different choice is often tantalizingly out of reach, even when you know exactly what you want to do differently. So what’s going on? If you don’t make a different choice, does that mean you really don’t want to? Does it mean you lack self-control or will power? Does it mean you’re trying to sabotage yourself?

If you believe that you could make a different choice but don’t, why don’t you?

When you fail to make a different choice, you’re forced to explain yourself—at least to yourself. The result is often the beginning of a vicious cycle of rationalization, excuse-making, or self-blame that can drag on for years or even decades. This is a waste of time and totally counterproductive to changing behavior.

The more we discover about the circuitry of the brain, the more the answers tip away from accusations of indulgence, lack of motivation, and poor discipline—and move toward the details of the biology. —David Eagleman, Incognito

The truth is that you don’t always have a choice. In fact, you rarely have a choice. You keep doing the same things you’ve always done because that’s how your brain is wired. It conserves precious energy by turning as many behaviors as possible into routines and habits. Once those routines and habits are in place, they’re extremely difficult to disrupt. When faced with a familiar situation, you will most likely do what you’ve always done in that situation, even if you want to do something else.

Minute by minute, second by second, the unconscious part of your brain is absorbing and processing an unbelievable amount of data, all but a small fraction of which you’re not consciously aware of. So at the moment you’re faced with that familiar situation, your unconscious has picked up on signals, made connections, and initiated the usual response all before you can consciously consider doing something different. When it comes to routines and habits, consciousness is simply no match for the speed and anticipatory responses of the unconscious brain.

Letting Go of the Illusion

It’s hard to give up our illusions about choice. We want to keep our options open instead of locking ourselves in. We want to be spontaneous. And we prefer to believe we’re exercising conscious choice, no matter how ineffective or detrimental those choices may be. As a result, we often refuse to make a commitment, even to something we really want or that really matters to us.

We repeatedly put far more trust than is warranted in our conscious brain’s ability to override our unconscious brain’s programming. We’re convinced that next time we’ll do things differently.

The reality is that keeping our options open really means leaving the outcome to chance. Yes, there’s a slim possibility that when the moment comes we’ll make a different choice. But the odds are not on our side. The unconscious operates automatically and at a much faster speed than the conscious part of our brain.

When we blame our inability to effect change in our lives on a lack of self-control or will power, our only option is to work on developing those mental muscles. That can be done, to a limited extent, but the source of the problem is not the lack of self-control and will power but our reliance them.

The situation is not hopeless, however. We’re not entirely at the mercy of the unconscious part of our brain. We do have a say in the matter. We can learn how to use both parts of our brain to our advantage instead of letting the unconscious have its way all the time.

But that requires changing the way we think about choice.

The concepts of freedom and choice seem to belong side by side. After all, what is freedom if not freedom to choose? The idea that we could be free, experience freedom, without also having and exercising the ability to choose is difficult to contemplate.

But Krishnamurti believed otherwise.

We think that through choice we are free, but choice exists only when the mind is confused. There is no choice when the mind is clear. When you see things very clearly without any distortion, without any illusions, then there is no choice. A mind that is choiceless is a free mind, but a mind that chooses and therefore establishes a series of conflicts and contradictions is never free because it is in itself confused, divided, broken up.

Decide Now so You Won’t Have to Choose Later

Changing behavior requires that you do something different ahead of time instead of counting on doing something different in the moment. Determine how you want to respond in a familiar situation when you have some distance from it and can think clearly about it instead of when you’re in that situation. And then make a pre-commitment. A pre-commitment eliminates the need to make a choice in the moment because you’ve already decided what you’re going to do.

  1. Formulate a clear and specific intention.
  2. Come up with a way to keep your attention focused on your intention.
  3. Assume you won’t be perfect out of the gate. Your unconscious brain is stubborn and set in its ways. With perseverance, however, your desired response will become the automatic one.

By giving up your so-called freedom of choice, you greatly increase the likelihood you’ll do what you’ve decided you want to do in order to have the life you want to have.

You can have what really matters to you

Hooked on The Brain with David Eagleman

by Leave a Comment

david eagleman brain3

I’ve just finished watching the third episode of this PBS series and I think I’m more hooked on David Eagleman and the brain than I was on J.R. Ewing and Dallas back in the 1980s. I’ve spent the past three and a half years intensely focused on learning as much as I can about brain, mind, and behavior, so I’m not really surprised that so far I’m familiar with everything that’s been presented in the first three episodes of The Brain. However, that hasn’t dampened my enthusiasm for the series. Quite the opposite. I’ve pre-ordered the DVD and look forward to many future viewings and to sharing the episodes in my classes. I’m thrilled to see this information put together so beautifully and made so widely available. Not everyone is hooked on the brain—at least not yet, anyway. Maybe more people will be after watching.

When I look back on the path to creating Farther to Go! a number of moments stand out. Of course, memory is a bit of a crapshoot when it comes to accuracy, but I do have physical evidence that these things actually happened when I recall them happening.

More than 20 years ago, when I was working as a substance abuse counselor, I came across a book by Richard Restak, The Brain Has a Mind of Its Own. The chapter of the same name described experiments in the 1980s by Benjamin Libet that identified a readiness potential that was observed in the brain prior to the subjects’ awareness of their desire to take a specific action. Quite a few people in a number of different disciplines seemed disconcerted by these findings, concerned about the fate of our so-called free will. I was fascinated. The implication was that things are not as they seem—or as we feel them to be. Restak’s a good writer and the rest of the chapters in his book were no doubt interesting, but all I recall is the information on Libet’s experiments. If you watched Episode #3 of The Brain, you saw some of the current research in this area.

A few years later, I took a biological psychology class that further whetted my interest in how the brain and mind (if they are indeed separate from each other) actually work. That’s where I first encountered the split-brain research of Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry. I don’t know whether the instructor made a point of this particular research or whether I was particularly fascinated by it. But Gazzaniga’s name and research clicked into place for me when I came across them again several years ago. He’s the person who came up with the concept of the Inner Interpreter, which Eagleman alluded to when he mentioned how the conscious part of the brain comes up with a good story about why we’ve just done something.

In 2011, The New Yorker ran an article, titled The Possibillian, about a neuroscientist named David Eagleman, who had spent time living in Albuquerque, which is where I live. He had attended Albuquerque Academy, which is practically within walking distance, and lived in roughly the same part of town. At the time, he was studying “brain time”—essentially how and why our experience of time differs from the actual passage of time. I found the article interesting enough to have torn it out of the magazine and saved it, which isn’t something I do very often. A year or so later, I was browsing the shelves of a local bookstore and saw Eagleman’s name on the spine of a book titled Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. Had I not known who he was, I might not have pulled the book off the shelf. And had the book I was actually looking for been available, I doubt I would have purchased Incognito.

The first chapter in Eagleman’s book, titled “There’s Someone In My Head, But It’s Not Me” (a tip of the hat to Pink Floyd), had enough references to things I already knew about, but expanded beyond anything I had previously been aware of, that I read all 19 pages standing next to my dining table without even taking my jacket off. I’ve since learned he studied literature before turning his full attention to neuroscience, which may explain his talent as a writer.

Just glancing through the pages of the book now and noting what I highlighted or earmarked reminds me of how excited I was to read and think about some of these things for the very first time. Concepts that seemed new or difficult to comprehend or somewhat improbable have become part of my mental model of the way the world—and my brain—work.

He closes the book with these words:

What a perplexing masterpiece the brain is, and how lucky we are to be in a generation that has the technology and the will to turn our attention to it. It is the most wondrous thing we have discovered in the universe, and it is us.

That’s exactly how I feel. I’m definitely hooked on the brain, with or without David Eagleman, but he’s a most excellent tour guide. Everyone should be watching this series!

Contact Me

joycelyn@farthertogo.com
505-332-8677